Stateless - Ariel - out on Ninja Tune

Stateless return with the first single from their forthcoming album Matilda (their first for Ninja Tune). Working with producer Damian Taylor (Bjork, The Prodigy), Stateless have taken a more electronic line for the new album and it shows on opener Ariel. While the quality of songwriting remains intact and Chris James' voice has never sounded better, Ariel finds him laying out the melody over West African guitar lines, crunching snare snaps and thunderous kicks, dubstep sub-bass splatters and glitchtronic interference. It's an utterly compelling combination, classic songwriting rendered completely new. The feel of a new direction is reinforced by a series of fantastic remixes. Rustie gives the original an even more glistening electronic feel and a certain aqua-crunk magnificence. Up-and-coming dubsteppers Dark Sky speed things up for a garage-influenced dancefloor number that keeps building and changing right to the end. Meanwhile, the Midlands Inflight remix, locks into a Voodoo Ray-ish dub-house groove that emphasises the melancholy of the original. With Matilda due for release in February, Ariel shows a group willing to push at the boundaries and reap the rewards of their bravery. Fasten your seatbelts…

Press Release :
Stateless return with the first single from their forthcoming album "Matilda" (their first for Ninja Tune). "Matilda." Working with producer Damian Taylor (Bjork, The Prodigy), Stateless have taken a more electronic line for the new album and it shows on opener "Ariel."

The feel of a new direction is reinforced by a series of fantastic remixes. Rustie gives the original an even more glistening electronic feel and a certain aqua-crunk magnificence. Up-and-coming dubsteppers Dark Sky speed things up for a garage-influenced dancefloor number that keeps building and changing right to the end. Meanwhile, the Midlands Inflight remix, locks into a Voodoo Ray-ish dub-house groove that emphasises the melancholy of the original.

With "Matilda" due for release in February, "Ariel" shows a group willing to push at the boundaries and reap the rewards of their bravery. Fasten your seatbelts…

Biography :
Stateless were formed in 2003 by singer-songwriter Chris James, who enlisted band members Kidkanevil (programming, samplers, turntables), Rod Buchanan-Dunlop (keys, FX), James Sturdy (drums) and John Taylor (bass) to bring his compositions to life. In true rock-fairytale style, their first demo, "Prism # 1," was picked up and playlisted by Radio 1, leading to a record deal with Sony. The band were quickly shipped off to the famous Rockfield studios in Wales to record their eponymous debut album with producer Jim Abbiss (U.N.K.L.E., Arctic Monkeys). When Sony merged with BMG, though, the band found themselves in limbo and chose to move to respected Berlin label !K7, who released the album internationally in July 2007. The record met with acclaim from across the board, hailed by everyone from Mojo ("A visionary debut " ****) to DJ ("one of the albums of the year" ****1/2). Stateless toured the album all over Europe with new band members Justin Percival (bass/vocals), and Dave Levin (drums), coming to the attention of legendary producer DJ Shadow, who enlisted Chris to sing on two songs on his album, "The Outsider." This was followed by a huge world tour with over 80 shows in 20 countries. With the new album, "Matilda," James decided to adopt a different approach. The first decision the band made was to push their combination of classic songwriting and story-telling into deeper electronic territory. Kidkanevil pushed his beats and programming to a new level and with the help of producer Damian Taylor (Bjork, The Prodigy) this battle between classic songwriting and electronic programming and production took the album into a whole new territory. It has already been described as sounding like Jeff Buckley battling Modeselektor with a twist of Timbaland.

The band met Taylor backstage at a Bjork gig on her Volta Tour. Soon after, James sent him some of the new Stateless demos, which Taylor loved, and they began working on the album. The process was complex. The band recorded their parts either at home or in a recording studio in Hackney, London. Then they would send all the parts to Taylor in Vancouver, who would start applying his production techniques. Towards the end of 2009 James flew out to Vancouver to record in Taylor's studio in the forest on the Sunshine Coast, it was here that the pair did the final production work on the album. "I think I got obsessive compulsive disorder," confides James. "I got really bad insomnia. I literally couldn't stop thinking about it. It wasn't a very healthy place at all, it was quite a dark time."
Of the guest artists, first came Shara Worden, of My Brightest Diamond. The band first met her when they both played on a TV show in Manchester in 2007 called City Centre Social on Channel M. They recognised musical like-minds and kept in touch and James wrote a duet called ‘I'm On Fire' with Shara in mind. He flew over to record the song in her living room in Brooklyn, as live and spontaneous as could be, James wanting to get back to the old school style of having singers in the room together, singing live together, capturing a moment. Next came the world-renowned contemporary-classical string group, the Balanescu Quartet, who have worked with everyone from David Byrne and Michael Nyman to Hector Zazou. James wrote the string arrangements with Gillian Wood, and the group performed them on four songs for the new album.

But it wasn't just it terms of technology that things changed with this record. As James explains, "The production is much more electronic on this album but the songwriting is quite different from the first album, too. It's more based on surreal stories and characters, it's much more cinematic. It really blurs the lines between fantasy and reality." It's a record he's rightly very proud of, both for the passion and commitment that went into making it, but also for the result. "It's like a strange and beautiful dream, " he says. "It's dark, surreal, mysterious, full of weird and wonderful characters. It's a big piece of work. I hope that people get that, when they hear it. I think it's gonna take quite a few listens before it really sinks in. It's a proper album, it works as a whole. I want people to do the Pink Floyd thing, and listen to it from start to finish really loud on good headphones."

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